Monday, July 20, 2015

In 1798 Napoleon sent a large corps of scientists and scholars to accompany his troops in Egypt. Intended to establish his Enlightenment cred, these scholars sent back various reports to France. On July 19, 1799, one of those experts sent a letter detailing an ancient stone that contained writing in three languages: undecipherable Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Demotic, and ancient Greek. That find, the Rosetta Stone, was the key to understanding ancient Egyptian writing and an entire civilization.

In an early 19th century form of competitive crowdsourcing, many casts and lithographs of the stone were made and a diverse field of scholars used them to spend the next twenty years deciphering the unknown Egyptian languages.

Direct Dimensions joined that community of scholars, lithographers and cast makers when we 3D scanned one of the original casts of the Rosetta Stone to make a digital replica (without touching the precious original artifact).

The final 3D model is a 21st century digital copy that is 3d printable and will allow scholars and Egyptophiles to continue to analyze (or even own) an exact copy of the original.

Thursday, July 16, 2015

When the creators of the "Your Brain" exhibit at The Franklin Institute tried to make a 3D print of a brain model they were turned away by every 3D printing company they approached. The companies all said the intricate 3D model would be impossible to print.

Having been in business for twenty years, we are always excited to solve "impossible" problems. As experts of 3D model creation we went back to the beginning and approached the problem from a data perspective.

According to Direct Dimensions' Art Director, Harry Abramson: "Fortunately Dr. Voss provided an amazing data set for us to start
with. In order to print this at large scale, each of the thousands of
strand models would have to be fused to create a single brain model that
could then be sliced into printable parts that fit in the build
envelope. The whole model would then need engineering and design
modifications to ensure that it could be assembled precisely and support
itself on its custom mount.

To collaborate on the printing we contacted our friends at American Precision Prototyping. “We went over the size constraints of the build envelope, the
volume of the object and our lead time, and very quickly I had a price
and APP's guarantee that they could build the brain as long as we could
prepare the files,” said Abramson. “What we lacked in budget, we made up
with having a long lead time, so the project was a go!”

The final, giant brain print is the centerpiece of the exhibit.

From APP's story on the project: "It has really become one of the iconic pieces of the exhibit. Its
sheer aesthetic beauty takes your breath away and transforms the exhibit
space," said Dr. Das. "The fact that it comes from real data adds a
level of authenticity to the science that we are presenting. But even if
you don't quite understand what it shows, it captures a sense of
delicate complexity that evokes a sense of wonder about the brain."